I’ve just had an interesting discussion regarding the intersection between random generators and railroads.

Hypothetical Situation #1: You’re running a standard hexcrawl campaign. You generate a sequence of six locations. Regardless of where the PCs decide to go, they will encounter those six locations in the order that you prepared them.

This is self-evidently a railroad.

Now, take this hypothetical situation and begin stripping off locations until you’re left with a single location. Regardless of which direction the PCs leave town, they will encounter that specific location.

Still self-evidently a railroad.

Hypothetical Situation #2: You’re running a standard hexcrawl campaign. You create a random encounter table of six locations. When the PCs leave town, you start rolling on the random encounter table. As they encounter locations you cross them off the random encounter table. Since they’re randomly generated, however, the sequence in which they’re encountered may vary.

Is that a railroad?

Does your answer change if I similarly strip off locations until the random encounter table consists of a single location?

THE CORE DISTINCTION

Does this mean that random content generators are an example of railroading?

No. But this thought experiment does demonstrate the complexity of these issues and the danger of trying to create some sort of “railroading purity test” for various techniques without considering the motivation, context, and methodology of their use.

The core distinction here is whether or not the players are making a meaningful choice. In this hypothetical hexcrawl scenario, the choice of direction has been rendered meaningless (since you’ll have the same experience regardless of which direction you go). And if the choice is meaningless, why are you having the players make it? Why are you lying to them about the choice being meaningful?

Random anecdote time: Many, many moons ago my players needed to explore the sewers beneath a major fantasy metropolis. I didn’t want to map the sewers out and the only game structure I really understood for that sort of thing at the time was dungeoncrawling. So I came up with a system which randomly generated dungeoncrawling maps for the sewer.

This worked just fine and the players were having a great time… until they realized that the terrain was being randomly generated. Their interest in exploring the sewers instantly evaporated: They knew that their choices were irrelevant. There was nothing that could actually be discovered. They were using a game structure of exploration, but they weren’t actually exploring anything.

This taught me a really important lesson as a GM: In order for an exploration scenario to work, there has to actually be something to explore. If all choices are equally likely to get you to your goal (because your discoveries are being randomly generated or because the GM has predetermined their sequence), then your choices become meaningless. And meaningless choices are boring and frustrating.

MAKING CHOICE MEANINGFUL

I’ve talked frequently in the past about the usefulness of procedural content generators: In a dungeon, random encounters can simulate the activity of a complex. In open campaigns, dungeons can be restocked with random generators. In hexcrawls, random generators can simulate the activity of the wilderness or they can be used to generate new locations on-the-fly.

These tools are incredibly useful. But how do you use them in a way that doesn’t negate player choice? How do you use them without the railroad?

The solution is actually quite obvious: Make sure the players’ choices are still meaningful even with the presence of the random elements.

A really simple example of this is simply allowing the actions taken by the PCs to affect the random generators: In a dungeon, for example, certain activities will create noise and increase the likelihood or frequency of encounters. In a hexcrawl, choosing to go to the Old Woods will cause the GM to roll on a different random encounter table than the Volcanic Peaks. And so forth.

Another straight-forward variation, in the context of an exploration scenario, is to create an environment with enough meaningful detail that it renders choice meaningful while the random content provides an additional patina of variety. For example, for my OD&D open table hexcrawl I keyed specific content to 256 hexes. That pre-existing geography creates a ton of meaningful choice: The random encounters that are being generated on top of it simply provide additional spice. Another example is the dungeon complex where the keyed rooms provide the meaningful choices, while the random encounter table provides a variety of activity throughout the complex.

A more complex variation would be a procedural content generator that creates an environment as the PCs explore it. This only works, however, if the location at which a piece of content is encountered becomes meaningful. This rules out purely ephemeral encounters (you meet eight orcs and you kill them) because the location is meaningless. But if the PCs are heading west and discover that the Salt Flats of Doom are over there and that Castle Vampire is on the far side of that difficult-to-traverse terrain, that geographical placement becomes meaningful if/when the PCs start mounting expeditions to Castle Vampire. (You could also imagine a structure where placing Castle Vampire and the Valley of the Giants next to each other creates a unique alliance that wouldn’t occur if it turns out that the Valley of Giants is on the other side of town.) The ability to revisit and reincorporate content, as is so often the case, is the key factor here.

Let’s consider a non-exploration example: In Technoir, the plot map of the scenario is randomly generated by the GM through play. Both the GM and the players discover the truth of the conspiracy together. However, before the players make any decisions the GM creates the mission seed which forms the core of the conspiracy. The mission seed provides the pre-existing detail which makes choices meaningful as the PCs seek to unravel the conspiracy (and, usually, penetrate to the heart of the mission seed). Even though the outcomes of these decisions are random, the choices remain meaningful because (a) they determine how the random elements connect to the mission seed (even as they also continue to redefine the conspiracy as a whole) and (b) the mission seed itself is a hard truth which can actually be discovered.

There are a lot of other ways in which random generators could be rooted into meaningful choice (or surrounded by it) without losing their utility. (And we would doubtlessly discover even more if we started poking around other game structures.) What you’ll note, however, is that all of these techiques are very different from simply taking the encounter you want the PCs to have and putting it in front of them regardless of which choices they make.

Go to the Railroading Manifesto

Go to Part 1

LIMITING SOLUTIONS

The mechanical gate is a specific example of a broader category of chokers in which the potential solutions to a problem are limited. This limitation self-evidently creates an experiential chokepoint.

Limiting solutions merely for the sake of limiting solutions is almost always a railroad-by-design. What can avoid the railroad, however, is only limiting the potential solutions to a problem within a specific paradigm.

For example, the PCs encounter the Sphinx and it demands an answer to its riddle. Within the paradigm of “solving the riddle” there is only one solution (because the riddle only has one answer). Outside of that paradigm, however, the PCs could also kill the Sphinx, teleport past the Sphinx, or hire someone to deal with the Sphinx for them. (If you opt for the last of these, however, I recommend not marrying the handsome young lad who solves the problem for you. It’ll end in tears of blood.)

The example of the Sphinx, however, also reveals why the technique of limiting solutions can be effective: It creates a sense of accomplishment when the answer to a problem is discovered. (Or when you manage to MacGyver your way around it.) An adventure that consists only of Sphinxes who say, “Say any word and you can go ahead.” is a lot less interesting than puzzling out the answer to an actual riddle. (Or, alternatively, slipping on your ring of invisibility and tricking Gollum into leading you to the surface.)

INFORMATION ARROWS

In addition to limiting solutions, you can also limit information. The classic example of this, once again, is the clue in a mystery scenario. (Here the information provided by the clue is also the limited solution to the problem of where you need to go to find the next clue, which also demonstrates how much overlap there is between these different categories of chokers.)

But the limiting (or structuring) of information can also encourage PCs to interact with a situation in a specific way. Or create entirely new ways for them to interact with it.

A simple example: The PCs discover information that they can use to blackmail the programming director of Arcadia Television. Without that information, blackmail is impossible. With that information, blackmail becomes possible. (Limiting information can be used to prevent certain choices from being made by withholding knowledge that they’re possible.)

Another example: Someone is being framed for a crime. If the PCs are aware of the character’s innocence when they begin their investigation, that’s a very different scenario than if the PCs are ignorant of it.

Let’s take a more complicated example. Imagine a simple hexcrawl in which the small village of Laciton is surrounded by six hexes. These hexes are keyed with:

• The ruins of the Keep of the Dracolich
• A bleakened fairy ring
• A mammoth cave system used by goblin marauders
• A lake that’s home to a prophetic sylph
• A tower haunted by “ghosts” who are actually dimensionally-displaced wizards
• The dreamgroves of the ash-scarred ents

In one version of this hexcrawl, the PCs can go to the center of Laciton and see a billboard that lists all six of the interesting locations surrounding the village. There is no choker and the information is freely available: They can simply choose which location they want to investigate first.

In another version of this hexcrawl, the PCs can ask around town. The villagers know that there’s a ruined keep west of town. They know that goblin marauders are attacking the outlying farms, but they don’t know where they’re coming from. They also warn people away from the “haunted tower”. In this campaign, although the default hexcrawl structures still make it possible for the PCs to visit any of the six locations they want, each limited piece of information creates an arrow which points them preferentially towards the things they know about.

SCARCITY OF RESOURCES

In the blackmail example above, the information was a necessary tool and the withholding of that information necessarily removed the ability to make certain choices. Information, however, is not the only resource which can be required in order to make a particular choice possible.

For example, the PCs might want to blow up the demon with a bazooka. But if they don’t have a bazooka, they obviously can’t do that. Similarly, 1^st level D&D characters generally don’t have access to a teleport spell, so they won’t be able to teleport into Skull Mountain.

This choker can also appear during play if the PCs are deprived of a resource: Their swords can be sundered. Their hotel rooms plundered. Their evidence confiscated. Their informants killed.

What I generally recommend when it comes to a scarcity of resources, however, is that it is almost always the right course of action to make it possible for the PCs to gain the resources they want. That doesn’t have to be easy, of course: When Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Scooby Gang wanted a bazooka to blow up a demon, they had to leverage their existing resources (Xander’s vestigial memories of being an enchanted soldier) in order to stage a difficult raid on a military armory.

If the resource they want simply doesn’t exist, is there some way that it can be created? For example, there might not be any blackmail available on the local politician because he’s actually a pretty decent guy. That doesn’t mean they can’t set up a honeytrap and create the blackmail material they need.

DEADLINE

When the resource being limited is specifically time, you’ve created a deadline.

The limitation of time has the practical effect of taking certain options off the table. For example, if you know the Priests of Orcus are sacrificing Lady Karna at the stroke of midnight, then the option of performing a tactical retreat and coming back in the morning after you’ve had a chance to recuperate is no longer viable. (Assuming you want to save her, of course.)

However, you can also use deadlines to make choices more meaningful: When the Joker tells Batman that he only has time to save one of the hostages from dying in a gasoline explosion, that creates a crucible for the character which reveals deep truths. (Although sometimes what’s revealed is that you can outsmart the Kobyashi Maru and save everybody. Don’t get so attached to your crucibles that you start negating player choices that would circumvent them.)

UNIQUE REWARD

The opposite of a limited resource is a unique reward which can be only be gained in a specific way.

A pile of gold coins is not a unique reward; there are a lot of gold coins out there. Even the bazooka from the local armory isn’t a unique reward because, again, there are other bazookas out there.

Having to go to the Lady of the Lake in order to claim Excalibur? That’s a choker.

Like the Sphinx and its riddle, clever PCs may be able to find other methods of obtaining the reward. (And an Arthurian campaign where King Arthur murders the Lady of the Lake and steals her sword is definitely going to be a fascinating iteration of the legend.) But, generally speaking, the unique reward is a giant carrot that says, “Come over and do this really cool thing so that you can get this really awesome reward.”

EXTERNAL EVENTS

An external event is one which cannot be anticipated (or prevented) by the PCs because it originates from outside the domain of their experience.

For example, the Red Dragon Gang decides to put a hit out on the PCs. You make a note in your prep documents that on November 18^th dragon ninjas are going to track the PCs down and attack them.

If the PCs were previously interacting with the Red Dragon Gang (or, possibly, just aware of them) this is not an external event: The attack could theoretically be prevented if the PCs wipe the gang out before the 18^th or negotiate a truce with them or fake their own deaths or just coincidentally kill the dragon ninjas who were supposed to be attacking them on the 18^th.

If the PCs were NOT previously interacting with the gang, however, it’s an external event. And it’s a choker because there’s no functional way for the PCs to avoid the attack. (Hypothetically, of course, they might have just left town or something. Which is why this is a choker and not a railroad.)

When taken to an extreme – when the PCs are subjected to an endless sequence of external events over which they can have no influence or control – these chokers can be hideously frustrating. In practice, fortunately, that’s very unlikely: The reaction to being ambushed by dragon ninjas is generally going to be figuring out who sent the dragon ninjas, which immediately gets the PCs involved in events over which they do have control.

And external events can be incredibly useful to the GM because they automatically provide the certainty which simplifies smart prep: Since the PCs basically can’t avoid them, the GM can assume they happen without needing to spend a lot of time on contingency plans. They are bangs that can be carefully incubated and then unleashed at the perfect moment.

External events, properly implemented, can also be very effective in providing a larger structure for the campaign. My Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, for example, started with the PCs waking up after losing two years of their memories. In preparing the campaign, I knew that Act II would be triggered when someone they had hired to find a magical artifact during their period of amnesia returned to tell them that the artifact had been located.

With that external event in my pocket, I could confidently build the interlocking scenarios of Act II without needing to worry about whether or not a specific outcome would emerge from Act I.

It should be noted that this didn’t mean that the events of Act I were irrelevant. Quite the contrary: Ninety sessions into Act II, the decisions they made in Act I continue to resonate daily in the campaign. Intriguingly, this is largely because the decisions they made created a rich tapestry of chokers: They chose alliances and they rejected others. They destroyed some enemies and allowed others to escape. They learned some secrets and gave others away before they knew what they had. All of those decisions limited their resources and the information that they held, which has had a deep impact on how they’ve been able to approach Act II and the problems it presents.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Czege Principle maintains that, “When one person is the author of both the character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.”

This is a principle which applies equally to roleplaying games, storytelling games, and improvisational theater. In the case of roleplaying games, it generally means two things:

First, railroads are boring. The GM creates the adversity and they also create the resolution of the adversity. (Then they force the players into acting out the resolution they’ve already created.)

Second, chokers are necessary. Chokers are either the means by which the GM creates adversity or the result of that adversity in play. A campaign without chokers is a featureless expanse in which the PCs face no adversity of which the players are not the ultimate architect. Here, too, adversity and solution flow from a single spring and the result is lusterless.

Avoiding the railroad does not mean that the GM must abandon their creative agenda. Quite the opposite, in fact. The GM must create richly and they must create deeply, so that when their creations meet the creativity of their players there will be greatness born in the clash of titanic ideas.

Addendum: I Want To Be Railroaded
Addendum: Random Railroads
How a Railroad Works

Go to Part 1

There’s been a recent memetic trend of attempting to defend the idea of railroading your PCs by, first, claiming that a bunch of stuff that isn’t railroading is a “railroad” and then using that claim to conclude that railroading isn’t bad and we should all just stop worrying about it.

It’s as if I said, “Racism isn’t all bad. After all, apple pies are totally racist. But they taste delicious, right?” It sounds perfectly reasonable until you notice that the bit about apple pies being racist is bullshit.

One thing to keep in mind is that the metaphorical use of the verb “railroad” is not a piece of terminology unique to RPGs. It’s an English word dating to 1884 that means, “To force someone into doing something by rushing or coercing them.” Whenever you see someone trying to defend railroading by claiming that it includes a bunch of techniques that don’t include forcing the players to do something they don’t want to do, they’re abusing the terminology. The term “railroading” in this context has an inherently negative connotation, and it’s simply not useful to attempt to redefine the English language so that you can use the term “railroad” to describe some completely different technique that isn’t railroading.

What would be useful, on the other hand, is a new term that we could use to describe the body of techniques which limit player choice. We’re going to call them chokers. (Because they create chokepoints in your scenario design.)

Limiting player choice, you’ll note, is distinctly different from negating their choices. While chokers can certainly be abused in order to constrain choice to the point where the GM is enforcing their preconceived outcome by default, imposing creative restraint upon a given situation creates interest and variety.

For those particularly paranoid about limiting the choices available to a PC, it may be useful to note that these chokers will also appear organically and spontaneously through play. The natural world, after all, often surrounds us by barriers. (For example, I am currently sitting in my office. The only way I can easily leave my office is through the door. I could also climb out the window. I might be able to hack my way through the wall, but that’s unlikely. The nature of the room has limited my choices.)

Being aware of these chokers will not only allow you to take advantage of their strengths, but also avoid their perils. The Three Clue Rule is an example of that: A breadcrumb-style mystery scenario is formed from a series of chokers, with each clue providing a very narrow and very specific path that leads to the next clue. The Three Clue Rule simply adds more clues, removing the choker and allowing the scenario to proceed smoothly.

THE ROAD

Let’s say that the PCs want to travel from Waterdeep to Neverwinter. Why they want to do this is largely irrelevant: Maybe they just learned that the man who killed their father has fled to Neverwinter. Or they’re traders who’ve heard that their Tethyrian textiles will fetch a good price there. Or maybe they just randomly decided to go there at the end of the last session.

So they look at the map and they say, “Hey. Let’s take the road.”

The road is a natural choker, narrowing their experiences to a sequence of literally linear events. For example, you could look at this journey from Waterdeep to Neverwinter and simply prepare it as:

• As they enter the Sword Mountains, they’re attacked by the Blood Shield Bandits.
• Black water kappa will emerge from the Mere of Dead Men as they pass it.
• North of the Mere of Dead Men they’ll encounter Benedict, an itinerant merchant with a beautiful daughter. The axle of their wagon has broken.

Insofar as the road is the natural choice for traveling from Waterdeep to Neverwinter, the choice of going to Neverwinter triggers this specific sequence of events.

Of course, one can loosen the choker if the PCs can choose from a variety of routes. For example, instead of taking the road from Waterdeep to Neverwinter, the PCs could book travel on a ship. (Of course, the journey by ship merely presents a different set of linear experiences.)

It should be noted, however, that the mere existence of multiple routes is often a false choice unless the choice between routes includes an incomparable difference. For example, if the PCs are concerned with speed and the only difference between the journey by sea and the journey by road is the amount of time they take, then there is no real choice: There’s only a calculation of which route will get them there faster. (See The Importance of Choice for a complete discussion of this.)

What I think is interesting about literal roads, however, is that they usually contain an incomparable choice by their very nature. For example, imagine that the PCs are going from Waterdeep to Triboar. There’s only one road, so that’s the way they have to go, right? Except, of course, they could also choose to journey cross-country. The cross-country journey would be slower, but it would also mean avoiding whatever troubles there might be on the road. (The choice between speed and avoiding the events on the road is the incomparable.)

Of course, not all roads are literal roads. Another metaphor for this sort of choker is a bullet in flight: The PCs load themselves into a gun and then pull the trigger. The choice of pulling the trigger is theirs, but once they have done so their flight will logically and naturally take them through a sequence of experiences. As long as they choose to remain upon the bullet, the bullet will continue to fly. You can either take this opportunity to show them some awesome stuff midflight or you can challenge them in order to make the decision to stay on the bullet a meaningful one.

A third way of understanding this choker is “looking out the train window”. Once they’ve made the decision to get on the train, it’s not necessarily impossible to get off before the next stop, but they’d have to put considerable effort into doing so. The metaphor of the train, however, also highlights the ability to create a rich scenario full of complex choices on the train: There may be a linear sequence of events rushing past the windows in the background, but that doesn’t need to be true of the immediate experiences of the PCs. (Maiden Voyage, a D20 adventure by Mike Mearls, is an excellent example of this type of scenario.)

Where you can get yourself into trouble is assuming that the PCs will take a road when they have no need to do so. (Or, worse yet, strong reasons for not taking the road.) For example, the Horror on the Orient Express campaign for Call of Cthulhu ironically makes it a bad idea for the PCs to take the Orient Express. (And then doubles down later in the campaign by, in fact, making it quite difficult for the PCs to stay on the train.)

MECHANICAL GATES

A mechanical gate exists whenever the PCs need to succeed on an action check in order to do a thing or go to a place or otherwise have a particular experience.

The simplest example of this is a secret door in a dungeon:

If the PCs fail to detect the secret door in Area B, then they will never discover Area C.

A mechanical gate like this is only a problem, of course, if Area C is of vital importance. For example, if Area C is the only place you can find the cure for the Princess’ disease. If the content in Area C is non-essential, on the other hand, then it simply serves as an optional reward for PCs who successfully leap the mechanical hurdle.

A common example of the mechanical gate is the breadcrumb trail approach to mystery scenario design: Every clue is necessary to reach the next section of the scenario, and thus every skill check to find a clue is a mechanical gate which must be passed through in order for the scenario to succeed. (This is the broken scenario structure which the Three Clue Rule seeks to fix. It’s like adding additional routes by which the secret chamber in the dungeon can be found.)

Go to Part 5: More Chokers

As the 16th century came to a close, Shakespeare began to experiment with tragedy.

On the Elizabethan stage, there were two dominant forms of tragedy: First, the classical tragedy. Derived from the Aristotelian theatrical principles of Ancient Greece, a classical tragedy features a protagonist possessed of a “tragic flaw” which creates a catastrophe in which their fortunes are reversed and their lives are destroyed.

Second, the revenge tragedy. Derived from the Roman plays of the playwright Seneca, revenge tragedies featured secret murders, a ghostly visitation in which the victim demands that their death be avenged, a period of intrigue and deception, and ultimately a bloody finale which would typically decimate the dramatis personae.

Shakespeare’s tragedies are usually viewed primarily through the lens of classical tragedy. This is partly due to early Shakespearean scholarship coinciding with a resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s theatrical philosophy, but it is also an overly simplistic understanding of Shakespeare’s approach to tragedy that often warps and distorts our understanding of the plays.

For example, consider The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The play long confounded critics because, when they went looking for its tragic hero, they failed to find it in Caesar and were instead forced to find it in the character of Brutus. For example, Charles Gildon wrote in 1710: “This play is called Julius Caesar, though it ought to be called Marcus Brutus; Caesar is the shortest and most inconsiderable part in it, and he is killed in the beginning of the Third Act. But Brutus is plainly the shining and darling character of the Poet; and is to the end of the play the most considerable person.” Tragic heroes aren’t allowed to die halfway through the play; ergo the play wasn’t about Julius Caesar.

But I would argue that the desire to cram the play into a pregurgitated outline is distorting Gildon’s interpretation. As I wrote in the program for our reading of Julius Caesar, the assassination of Caesar is the pivot on which the entire drama turns. And also the seam at which two different plays are welded into a greater whole. The first half of Julius Caesar is structured as classical tragedy: A great man suffers from the tragic flaw of Pride, and this flaw results in his destruction. The second half of Julius Caesar, on the other hand, is a revenge tragedy: Antony seeks revenge for the death of Caesar.

But this isn’t quite true, either: While the latter half may be a revenge tragedy for Antony, it’s also a classical tragedy for Brutus. And while the conspirators may see in the assassination a simple punishment for Caesar’s Pride, there is much in the play to cast doubt on this black-and-white interpretation. Caesar’s destruction comes from a nexus of outward agency rather than from pure self-destruction, creating an interesting variation upon the simplistic classical forms.

And in Hamlet we see Shakespeare continue to experiment with these forms. Here, I would argue, we see a play in which every character is the star of their own classical tragedy… except for Hamlet, who instead stars in a revenge tragedy. But Hamlet also completely subverts the revenge tragedy by insisting on the pursuit of justice instead of unbridled revenge. In the process he emerges as an unflawed hero… who is nevertheless caught in the inescapable web of tragedy woven by the interlocking tragedies of everyone around him.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

Claudius’ flaw is his ambition for the crown. The character clearly cries out for comparison to Macbeth, and like Macbeth his flaw brings about his death at the hands of revenge. Claudius identifies the flaw himself when he says, “Forgive me my foul murder? That cannot be since I am still possess’d of those effects for which I did the murder: My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen.” His murder of Old King Hamlet, of course, sets in motion the entire sequence of tragic events.

Polonius‘ flaw is that of eavesdropping and meddling — a compulsive need to control those around him. Hamlet offers it as a fortune to his corpse (“Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.”) and we see it manifest not only in the occulted schemes which cause hardship throughout the play, but also in his compulsive need to spy upon and control his own children. This, of course, brings about his own death in a quite literal fashion, and it is his death which irrevocably sets Hamlet on a path to his destiny from which he cannot escape.

Laertes‘ flaw is his lust for revenge. Although he has often been held up as the ideal of “what Hamlet should have been”, one can’t help noticing that Laertes is (a) repeatedly wrong; (b) has his over-zealousness endorsed by the villain; and (c) ends up getting everybody killed (including himself).

Ophelia’s flaw is that she shows more obedience to her father than to the man she expects to marry. The importance of Ophelia’s failure is demonstrated through what I refer to as the “Desdemona archetype”: Desdemona in Othello, Cordelia in Lear, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a half dozen other Shakespearean heroines are faced with the choice between loyalty to their fathers and loyalty to their future husbands. And every one of them transfers that loyalty without question (and are lauded for it). Ophelia is confronted with the same choice… and stays loyal to her father. In a figurative sense, therefore, she allows Polonius to murder the love she had for Hamlet; and then Hamlet quite literally murders the love she had for Polonius. In the end, she is broken into madness.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of course, are destroyed as the result of betraying their friends.

Gertrude, on the other hand, presents an interesting enigma throughout the play. But I suspect that we are meant to view her as unfaithful to her husbands (or, at least, their memories). Note that her unfaithfulness to Claudius at the end of the play (“Gertrude, do not drink.” “I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me.”) directly causes her death.

A HERO WITHOUT FLAW

“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”

Oh, Olivier.

That’s the tagline he pasted onto the prologue of his 1948 film of the play and it has utterly defined the character for at least three generations.

Of course, Olivier isn’t alone. The search for Hamlet’s tragic flaw has been hot and heavy for a couple centuries how: He’s mad in truth and not in craft. He has an Oedipal love for his mother. He’s secretly a woman dressed in boys’ clothes. All kinds of crazy stuff.

But the indecisiveness seems to have stuck for the most part. The logic goes that he should be like Laertes: Take the Ghost at his word, rush into the throne room, and stab Claudius right through the heart. Since he doesn’t do that, the play is really just a long sequence of adolescent excuses that Hamlet makes up so that he doesn’t have to do his chores.

As I mentioned before, though, I think there’s some real problems with identifying Laertes as the paragon of the play.

And there’s also the effect that “Hamlet the Waffler” has on the performance of the play: It means, quite literally, that nothing happens for more than 80% of the play. This isn’t necessarily a problem. (I’m fairly certain Samuel Beckett made an entire career out of it.) But combined with the Hamlet‘s length, it’s usually disastrous: It takes a long play and turns it into an interminable one.

But if you take Hamlet at his word, then the play becomes a fast-paced battle of wits: Can Hamlet figure out a way to prove Claudius’ guilt before Claudius realizes what Hamlet’s doing? There are feints and ploys; suspicions and proxies; mistakes and missed opportunities.

Viewed in this light, Hamlet becomes a thrilling adventure story wrapped in the philosophy of life and built upon an incredibly complex scaffolding of interwoven tragedies.

That sounds like fun. Let’s see what happens.

Originally posted on November 22nd, 2010.

Tagline: Best German Game of 1995. Best U.S. Board Game of 1996.

Good board games are hard to find.

This is a truism which comes about because, the plain and simple truth is, board games are expensive to produce and hard to distribute. As a result, it is extremely difficult to introduce truly experiment in a meaningful way with board game mechanics (because it’s expensive to do so), and this inevitably leads to stagnation. (Cheapass Games, as I (and many others) have said before, has escaped these limitations by pioneering an entirely different marketing strategy. But Cheapass Games is special.)

To make matters worse, where a roleplaying game can be considered successful if you use it for one or two campaigns, for a board game to be successful (at least in my opinion) it needs to have lasting replay value. Or, to put it another way, even though Citizen Kane is a better movie than Die Hard, I don’t regret watching Die Hard. On the other hand, why would I play a substandard board game with my friends when I could be playing a better board game? To put it a third way: There’s a narrower potential for variety within any niche of the board game market than there is within the roleplaying markets or movies.

So, like I said, good board games are hard to find.

Which is why it’s always a joy to find a game like The Settlers of Catan. Sure, the cynic can claim that we’ve seen everything here before (hex-based maps from every wargame you’ve ever seen; combinations of resource cards are basically a mechanic from Risk; maintaining diplomatic relations from Diplomacy; variable board set-up from Chess variants; and trading resources from many variants of Monopoly), but the true aficionado will recognize a whole which is greater than the parts.

LEARNING THE GAME

The first thing to like about this game – and something so cool it deserves its own little section in this review (although largely because I’ve been a proponent of this type of lay-out for roleplaying games for a long time now) – are the dual manuals which come with it.

The first manual, Game Rules, is used – in combination with a large, full-color Game Overview sheet – to learn the games. It reads like a fairly standard game manual – taking you step-by-step through the game, with examples of play, repetition of concepts, etc.

But the game you learn is only a beginner’s version of the rules – most noticeably, the variable board rules (see below) are excluded in favor of a “standard board”. After playing your first game, you can proceed to the Settler’s Almanac to spice things up.

What makes this so cool, though, is that the Almanac is a reference for all the rules in the game. In the Almanac, however the rules are grouped by topicality, and are presented in a very technical format.

What does this mean in practical terms? Well, I’ve always disliked the fact that – with most games – you have to go wading through a manual designed to teach you the rules in order to reference the rules. The rules themselves are often spread out and buried behind the explanatory text. No such problem here. Because the Almanac is nothing except rules, reference is easy. And because the system starts simple and then lets you add in the more complex elements, its very easy to learn. The Game Overview sheet also contains a handy turn sequence reference, and every player gets a Building Costs card which summarizes the resource cost of building (see below).

Make no mistake about it, The Settlers of Catan is a moderately complex game (some would argue that it is a very complex game, but then some have never played Advanced Squad Leader). But the system they’ve implemented for new players to learn makes it seem as simple as Monopoly.

THE RULES

So what is this game all about?

The game is played by three or four players. Each player represents a group of colonists who have come to the largish island of Catan. By building settlements and roads you control various resources on the map, and by possessing resources you can build settlements, cities, roads, or development cards (see below).

GOAL: The goal of the game is to collect 10 victory points – which you do by building settlements (each worth one point) and upgrading those settlements to cities (making them worth two points). You can also achieve victory points through certain combinations of development cards, or by achieving certain meta-goals (such as the “Longest Road”, which gives you two victory points).

BOARD SET-UP: This is probably the most commented upon feature of the game: The board for The Settlers of Catan is variable, meaning you set it up differently each time you play. (Imagine, if you will, that Park Place and Boardwalk were in different places every time you played Monopoly.)

Basically the board comes in the form of seven types of hexagons: Mountains, Hills, Forests, Pastures, Fields, Harbors, Ocean, and Desert. Using a specific set of guidelines you randomly place these hexagons out onto the table, ending up with the island (composed of the five types of land the single desert card) in the middle, encircled by the ocean and harbor hexes. In addition, there are chits which bear little numbers on them – following a specific pattern these are placed one to each land hex (except the desert).

Finally, each player places two cities and two roads onto the board (there is a specific mechanism to figure out who gets to place their cities first and so forth). Cities are placed on the intersections between hexes (and thus always border three hexes) and must be at least two intersections away from any other city. Roads run along the edges of the hexes, and must be connected to one of the player’s cities. (Each road piece is one hex is long.)

GAME PLAY: Play proceeds in turns. First, you roll two six-sided dice. Compare the number you roll to the numbered chits on each hex – any hex which contains a chit which matches the number you rolled produces resources on that turn, based on the type of hex it is. (Mountains produce Ore, Hills produce Brick, Pastures produce Wool, Fields produce Grain, and Forests produce Wood.) Any settlement (yours or other players) which borders one of these hexes collects a resource card.

TRADE AND NEGOTIATION: There are two types of trade in the game: You can trade with other players (only the player whose turn it is can engage in trading); or you can trade overseas. Trade with other players is based entirely on negotiation and is, in my mind, the core of the game’s effectiveness and replay value – because it adds the complexity of human interaction into the outcome.

Trade overseas is mechanical. Anyone can trade four resources cards of one type for a resource card of any other type. However, if you control a harbor (by having a settlement on the intersection with a harbor hex) you will get better trade ratios – sometimes on all resources, sometimes on only one type of resource. (It depends on the harbor.)

BUILDING: Finally, resource cards are spent in specific combinations to build new settlements and roads, updating settlements to cities, or purchasing development cards. Development cards can do a variety of things (from giving you additional victory points to garnering you resource cards).

THE ROBBER: Finally, there is the “Robber” – who wanders around the board stealing resources from one player and giving them to another. There’s a specific set of mechanics governing the use of the Robber, but I won’t go into them here.

SOME NOTES ON EDITIONS, AWARDS, AND EXPANSIONS

The Settlers of Catan was originally released in Germany in 1995, where it promptly won the Spiel des Jahres. When it was released by Mayfair in the United States in 1996 it followed up its performance by winning the Origins Award for Board Game of the Year. With the third edition (the one you’ll buy if you buy Mayfair’s version), the rules were internationally standardized (they had not been before).

There are also a number of expansions for Catan — notably an expansion allowing play for five or six players (instead of three or four). The most major supplement to be released in the States to date is Seafarers of Catan, which develops the overseas elements of the game to a larger extent (there is also a 5/6-player expansion for Seafarers). For some reason the 5/6-player expansions are not compatible with the German edition (and the German expansions are not compatible with the United States edition). I don’t know why (although, obviously the artwork on the cards wouldn’t match).

Later this year we’ll also be seeing Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights which will expand the city rules and add warfare to the game.

In addition to all this there is a Settlers of Catan card game (non-collectible), which can be played by two players. Personally, I am very excited by the forthcoming United States release of Spacefarers of Catan, which is a stand-alone game involving colonizing space in a variable universe.

CONCLUSION

This is an elegantly designed game, and deserves every bit of praise it has earned over the past few years. The Diplomacy-like elements of the trade and negotiation which are at the heart of the game make the game a joy to play with friends and strangers alike. But Klaus Teuber has not failed to back this up with some strong strategic and tactical considerations. For example, the resources you need at various stages in the game shift gradually over time – thus you need to carefully plan how you’re going to get the resources you need to expand now, but also what resources you’re going to need to finish the game. (On more than one occasion a rising juggernaut which seemed incapable of being defeated ground to a halt because the player failed to get the proper access to the right resources to finish the game.)

Basically I’ve got only two, small complaints to level against Settlers of Catan: First, the price is a little steep. It’s well worth it, but it made the game a tough buy to get into. The prices on the expansion packs, though, really leave me wondering in some cases. (Particularly the $35 sticker on Seafarers of Catan, when the blurb says that “certain scenarios” will require the purchase of two of them!)

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there have been a significant fraction of sessions with this game where the random factor played – in my opinion – too large a roll (no pun intended). Although dice rolling is built into the system, it seems to me that the emphasis of the game is on strategy, tactics, and negotiation. But a handful of lucky rolls can really alter the whole course of the game. This was not a major problem, but it was a troubling one.

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Author: Klaus Teuber
Company/Publisher: Mayfair Games
Cost: $35.00
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: 1-56905-091-0

Originally Posted: 2000/04/06

This is a fascinating review to read in hindsight. First, because it’s kind of weird looking back at a time when Settlers of Catan was not completely secure in its position as a juggernaut of the board game industry.

Second, because my opinion of Settlers of Catan has soured considerably. (And it soured fairly quickly after this review was written. I don’t think I’ve played the game in at least a decade.) My primary problem with the game is that it masquerades as an extremely strategic game, but the outcome of any given game is heavily dependent on luck while featuring a very limited palette of experiences. It tends to attract the worst kind of casual player: The ones who think they’re Grandmasters of Chess because they have a basic grasp of probability.

One point I now firmly disagree with my former self about: Games featuring a division of their rulebooks into a beginner’s tutorial and an alphabetized rules reference generally suck. The entire methodology appears to be designed to achieve no other end than to guarantee that you’ll end up playing the game incorrectly while burying rules under arbitrarily arranged titles.

(This complaint does not necessarily apply to all games featuring introductory rulebooks. For example, Space Alert features an incredibly clever tutorial system that iteratively introduces new players to the complexities of the game. The key difference, however, is that Space Alert also features a complete rulebook which is organized procedurally for easy and intuitive reference.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.